Another Samsung Plaintiff Backs Moving Class Actions to San Francisco

Raffi Kelechian, a plaintiff in one of the dozen or more fraud class actions arising from Samsung’s summertime data breach, supports “centralization” of all the cases in the Northern District of California under U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley in San Francisco, he told the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation in a filing Tuesday (case number 3005). Kelechian supports Northern California as the venue because that’s where Samsung’s U.S. operations are based, he said. The Samsung Research America subsidiary is in Mountain View, California, and Samsung Electronics America is headquartered in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey. Though a group of plaintiffs has moved to consolidate the cases in the U.S. District Court for New Jersey, Kelechian said the Northern District of California “would be the best, most efficient and most streamlined forum.” His own case is pending in U.S. District Court for Central California in Los Angeles. The plaintiffs are evenly divided into camps that support consolidating the cases in San Francisco or Newark. Samsung supports centralizing them in U.S. District Court for Nevada in Las Vegas as the most appropriate forum because it’s home to the first-filed class action (see 2211030006). Samsung is hinting strongly it will base its defenses on motions to compel arbitration because consumer account holders agreed in their terms and conditions not to bring disputes before a trial judge or jury.